Skip Ward papers

Blanchard “Skip” Ward, born September 17th, 1920, was raised in Alexandria, Louisiana. After serving in the United States Marine Corps and traveling throughout the United States and abroad, he returned to central Louisiana in his adulthood, where he remained for the rest of his life. He became increasingly involved in LGBTQIA activism in the early 1970s, when he first came out as homosexual in a Unitarian church in Baton Rouge and went on to co-found the Unitarian/Universalist Church’s Gay Caucus. He also created Louisiana’s first publication tailored to its gay population, called Le Beau Monde. Skip Ward held some form of membership with nearly every Louisiana LGBTQIA organization from the 1970s onward and was particularly active in the Louisiana Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus, a political activist organization, and the Radical (or Raedical) Faeries, a national organization for rural-based gender and sexual non-conforming spiritualists.